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The Worst Week Yet: September 10-16, 2023

18-9-2023 < Counter Currents 29 2595 words
 

Zyahna Bryant


2,258 words


Cartoonishly Obese Black She-Beast Who Ruined White Woman’s Life with False Allegations Is Made Honorary Spokespig for Dove Soap’s “Fat Liberation” Campaign


Not so long ago, being black, female, and morbidly overweight were all considered liabilities. No more!


Not only does 22-year-old Zyahna Bryant have one of those annoying and guaranteed-to-be-misspelled made-up black names, she may actually be wider than she is tall . . . she’s that fat.


If you’re in the blamin’ mood, you can also blame Ms. Bryant for writing a 2016 petition that “gained national recognition” for demanding that the city of Charlottesville, Virginia take down its Robert E. Lee statue. Her political agitations may have played a pivotal role leading to the following year’s disastrous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.


During 2020’s Summer of Floyd, Bryant, who at that point was attending the University of Virginia (UVA), gained further notoriety when she accused a white student named Morgan Bettinger of saying that Black Lives Matter protesters, some of whom were sitting down in a street, would make “good fucking speed bumps.” Egged on by Bryant screaming that Bettinger was a “Karen,” a crowd gathered around Bettinger’s car and began threatening her, accusing her of threatening them. According to Bettinger, one of them must have overheard her telling a truck driver, whose vehicle was blocking the street, that it was a good thing his truck was there, otherwise some of the protesters who were lounging around on the street would have wound up as speed bumps.


But a mob high on social justice will not listen to reason. Beyond all the online and real-life harassment Bettinger faced after Bryant tweeted out her version of the “speed bumps” saga, Bryant filed a complaint against Bettinger with the university’s Office for Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights claiming that Bettinger had repeated the “speed bumps” thing five times and had also racially discriminated against Bryant.


Separate investigations by a students’ committee and the school’s civil-rights office sided with Bettinger’s version of events. Although the “good fucking speed bumps” threat was allegedly shouted at a crowd of 30 people, Bryant could not find one corroborating witness. She eventually admitted that maybe she’d “misheard” what Bettinger had said.


Regardless of whether she’s a racially spiteful fabulist, Bryant was richly rewarded because she’s fat, black, and female. In the summer of 2020 she was named in Teen Vogue’s “21 under 21” list. A 2021 Washington Post profile called her “The girl who brought down a statue,” presumably by sitting on it. In 2022, she was named to Ebony‘s “Power 100” list.


According to Reason magazine, “She was easily one of the most visible students at UVA — in part because her face was pictured on the side of a university bus.”


That must be quite a large bus.


This year brings the most ridiculous honor of all for Ms. Zyahna Bryant. Dove USA, the company that makes those pure-white Dove soap bars, decided it needed a “fat acceptance ambassador,” and you get no prizes for guessing which cocoa-tinted heart-attack-waiting-to-happen they chose. In an Instagram video that Bryant posted, she pauses from eating long enough to deliver the following sermon:


My belief is that we should be centering the voices and experiences of the most marginalized people and communities at all times. . . .


So, when I think about what fat liberation looks like to me, it looks like centering the voices and experiences of those who live in and who maneuver through spaces and institutions in a fat body. It looks like making accessible spaces and having conversations that are aware of the fact that people have different bodies, and that they are interacting with space and people and institutions and communities in a different way.


Fat liberation looks like fully embracing those differences and having those conversations instead of shying away from them.


The only thing that fat people need to shy away from is food.


Is the “Migrant Crisis” a Pimple Ready to Pop?


In 2010, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi warned that if Europe’s leaders didn’t honor his extortion demands, he would open the northbound floodgates for desperate African emigrants and turn Europe “black” out of spite:


We don’t know what will be the reaction of the white and Christian Europeans faced with this influx of starving and ignorant Africans. . . . We don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions.


In 2016, five years after Gaddafi’s death, the once all-Italian city of Palermo in Sicily had already turned a quarter non-Italian, with dark-skinned gangsters challenging the Mafia for criminal supremacy. Palermo Mayor’s Leoluca Orlando said that was a good thing:


Palermo is no longer an Italian town. It is no longer European. You can walk in the city and feel like you’re in Istanbul or Beirut. . . . Palermo is a Middle Eastern town in Europe. It is a mosaic city and we are happy about that. . . .


Last week, the Italian island of Lampedusa, which sits a mere 90 miles off the Tunisian coast and has an official population of 6,556, was bombarded with 7,000 black boat people over the course of two days. Someone quickly altered the island’s Wikipedia page to list its population as “6,556 (Not including ~7,000 undocumented immigrants).”


On Thursday, Lampedusa’s Mayor Filippo Mannino said the island had reached a “point of no return”:


In the past 48 hours, around 7,000 people have arrived on my island, an island that has always welcomed and saved in its arms. . . . Now we have reached a point of no return where the role played by this small rock in the middle of the Mediterranean has been put into crisis by the dramatic nature of this phenomenon.


Also on Thursday, National Public Radio announced that “The immigrant population in the U.S. is climbing again, setting a record last year”:


The number of people born somewhere else climbed by nearly a million last year, reaching a record high of just over 46 million, according to new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. . . .


“The foreign-born population zoomed up,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. “The gain in 2022 was as big as the previous four years put together.”


As fate would have it, I found myself spending about 24 hours early last week in Houston, Texas, which is America’s most charmless big city, provided that you ignore Phoenix. Statistically, Houston is America’s most “diverse” big city, where there is “no ethnic majority and where nearly one-in-four residents are foreign-born.” At the airport, announcements came over the public address system in Spanish, and only Spanish. There were fat black women everywhere being fat and acting black. Our Uber driver looked like a Chechen mixed martial arts fighter and clearly didn’t understand a word of English. But at least the Vietnamese restaurant where we had lunch was good.


Texas Governor Greg Abbott, whose state is saddled with about half of the US-Mexico border, has recently gained notoriety for taking some of the countless “migrants” who come north to Texas and schlepping them off to liberal sanctuary cities. In a television interview, he noted the hypocrisy of the mayors whose “sanctuary cities” are finally being forced to live up to their name. He also said that these mayors “could not last a week in Texas”:


What’s maddening is the fact that . . . they love to promote these liberal ideologies until they have to actually live up and apply them. . . . It was clear that the policies of sanctuary cities and letting everybody live for free simply do not work. This is a day of reckoning for all of the United States, realizing that the liberal policies of open borders will not work in this country.


You can buy Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! here.


New York City Mayor Eric Adams — who is black and got elected despite, or possibly because of, the fact that he bragged of kicking “crackers’ ass [sic]” when he was a cop — made headlines the week before last when he said that the 100,000+ so-called “asylum seekers” who’ve been dumped in the Big Apple since 2022 threatened to destroy the city:


The city we knew, we’re about to lose. . . . Let me tell you something, New Yorkers. Never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an ending to. I don’t see an ending to this. This issue will destroy New York City.


On Friday in Midtown Manhattan, protesters screamed “Close the border!” and “Send them back!” at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jerry Nadler as they attempted to hold a press conference to address the “migrant crisis.”


On Thursday in Los Angeles, the city’s black Mayor, Karen Bass, was speaking at an event hosted by Noticias Telemundo and expressed her anxiety that Abbott would start inundating LA with hordes of unwanted refugees:


We live in a city that welcomes immigrants, and so I think we have been able to handle it, but I am fearful that any day, planes could start coming. . . . What they’re trying to do is destabilize cities. . . . It’s the narrative that these are Democratic-run cities and that we don’t know how to govern and that everything is chaotic here.


A report in Human Rights Watch described how the Saudis handled their “migrant crisis” of Ethiopians trying to cross into Saudi Arabia from March 2022 to June 2023:


Saudi border guards have used explosive weapons and shot people at close range, including women and children, in a pattern that is widespread and systematic. . . . In some instances, Saudi border guards first asked survivors in which limb of their body they preferred to be shot, before shooting them at close range.


In other words, the Saudis are more considerate of their own citizens than they are to illegal interlopers. Sounds like a plan.


Founder of Rolling Stone Magazine Chastised for the Absolutely Truthful Statement that Black and Female Musicians Aren’t “Articulate”


Rolling Stone magazine was founded in 1967. It was named after a Bob Dylan song and brought rock criticism to new levels of pretension. It would frequently use adjectives such as “watershed” and “seminal” and “totemic” to describe mere pop records. In the service of fusing rock culture with progressive politics, it would sometimes do things such as perpetrate rape hoaxes.


If you’ve ever seen or read an interview with a musician, you’d know that hardly any of them could be described as “articulate.” This especially applies to black and female musicians for reasons that should be obvious.


Despite his Nordic-sounding name, Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner “grew up in a secular Jewish family,” with everything that implies. He found rock music interesting enough, or at least lucrative enough, to serve as Rolling Stone’s editorial director until 2019.


Wenner also co-founded the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 but was removed from its Board of Directors on Saturday after stating the obvious fact in a New York Times interview published on Friday that black and female musicians aren’t very articulate.


Apparently Wenner has been pimping some new book called The Masters that “features interviews with musicians Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Townshend and U2’s Bono,” which the Associated Press felt the need to point out are “all white and male.” Correction: In Garcia and Lennon’s case, they were white and male. And whether or not you consider Bob Dylan “white” is a good way of determining if you’re an anti-Semite.


When asked by New York Times reporter David Marchese why he chose those seven guys, Wenner responded:


The people had to meet a couple criteria, but it was just kind of my personal interest and love of them. Insofar as the women, just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level.


Marchese pushed back and said that Joni Mitchell — who in my opinion is severely overrated, and who to my knowledge never recorded a “rock ’n’ roll” song in her life — was articulate on, you know, an intellectual level. Wenner stood his ground and dug himself an even deeper grave:


You know, Joni was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test. Not by her work, not by other interviews she did. The people I interviewed were the kind of philosophers of rock. Of Black [sic] artists. . . . Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level. . . . I mean, look at what Pete Townshend was writing about, or Jagger, or any of them. They were deep things about a particular generation, a particular spirit and a particular attitude about rock ’n’ roll. Not that the others weren’t, but these were the ones that could really articulate it. . . . Just for public relations’ sake, maybe I should have gone and found one Black [sic] and one woman artist to include here that didn’t measure up to that same historical standard, just to avert this kind of criticism.


Ja, Jann, maybe you should’ve.


On Saturday, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame announced that Wenner had been removed from its Board of Directors, which led to the requisite groveling apology from Wenner:


In my interview with The New York Times, I made comments that diminished the contributions, genius, and impact of Black [sic] and women artists and I apologize wholeheartedly for those remarks. . . . They don’t reflect my appreciation and admiration for myriad totemic, world-changing artists whose music and ideas I revere and will celebrate and promote as long as I live. I totally understand the inflammatory nature of badly chosen words and deeply apologize and accept the consequences.


I would rather he’d apologized for using the phrase “myriad totemic,” but you can’t always get what you want.


Jim Goad

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